As fashion retailers grapple with sustainability, overproduction and customer loyalty, Mystic Moods founder and creative director Alina Stanila explains why her brand is putting its app at the centre of garment ownership.

Fashion retail’s problem is not only what happens before a garment reaches the shop floor but also what happens after it leaves, argues Alina Stanila founder of UK-based circular fashion studio Mystic Moods.

Having worked across high street fashion and suppliers before launching her own business, Stanila says she became increasingly uncomfortable with the volume of leftover fabrics being treated as waste.

“In 2022, I saw a massive gap between the leftover fabrics, end-of-line fabrics, and those fabrics either ending up in recycling centres or, if not, landfills,” she says.

“So much work in mills goes into making fabric. To actually see that being discarded didn’t sit really well with me.”

That observation became the starting point for her seasonless womenswear brand, built around deadstock and reclaimed materials. Rather than sketching a design first and sourcing fabric later, Stanila works in reverse: she finds the fabric, studies its weight and character, and then decides what it can become.

She explains: “I had to work the other way around. I found the fabric and then made the designs.”

The app-first sustainability pitch

While Mystic Moods began as an independent fashion business, its most distinctive retail play is now digital. Stanila launched the Mystic Moods app to give customers visibility over how a garment is made, what it is made from and what can happen to it after purchase.

“I say all the time that this is deadstock, that we are sustainable, but how do I actually show that?” she explains. “Being a very small business, it’s very hard to gain credibility around what I do. So, I built the Mystic Moods app around the idea that, OK, we are sustainable, we make all of these, but we also want to show this to our customers.”

The focus, she stresses, is not simply compliance or product information. Although digital product passports are becoming an increasing focus for the fashion industry, Stanila says her intention was to create a more practical ownership journey.

“My idea was to give a roadmap to what happens after you buy a garment.”

From post-purchase messaging to circular commerce

The app allows customers to understand the garment’s provenance, access care information and identify routes for resale, repair, donation or recycling. One of the features Stanila describes is a location-based map that helps customers find nearby charity shops or recycling centres.

“If a customer lives in London, it will track the customer in London,” she says. “It will show around the map where they can take it with the ambition to make sure that a good, well-made garment doesn’t end up in landfill.”

The proposition is less about another sustainability claim and more about rethinking customer retention. Stanila believes brands have an opportunity to move post-purchase communication; beyond discount-led emails; and into a service-led relationship with the customer.

“The app is something that I can’t stress enough how important and how amazing it will be for everyone to have an after-sale way to bring the customers back,” she says. “Not just to be a point of sale, but also an informative way: you have that garment, can we help you with something?”

Why scaling the platform matters

Mystic Moods is now looking at developing the app into a wider platform that other brands could use. The aim is to help retailers collect cleaner data on what happens to garments once they have been sold, whether they are passed on, returned, donated or recycled.

“We want to onboard other brands, to gather as much data as possible on what happens with the garment after a customer buys it,” Stanila says.

“Then we can have a clear view as to what’s happening in the country overall with garments after a garment has been purchased, rather than, ‘Oh, we don’t know. It just ended up somewhere.’”

She recognises, however, that making this work for larger retailers will require simplicity: “For an existing brand who has thousands of SKUs, you have to start all the way back,” she says. “Brands do want to do it, but they just need it simplified. This is what I’m working on now: making the most simple possible platform that can handle the SKUs and the data.”

The commercial reality of making locally

Stanila is candid about the economics of keeping production close. Mystic Moods produces locally and in small quantities to avoid overproduction, but that comes with pressure on margins and growth.

“Profitability is a challenge. Can I be very honest?” she says. “It is a lot harder making everything here.”

However, she argues that the model can work if the business does not commit to high-volume ordering or trend-led stock cycles.

“Because we do not rely on massive quantities, and we do not order in advance thousands of SKUs, it is very manageable to have production in the UK if the stock is less,” she notes. “It is a win in the long run if it’s kept within this idea.”

The app and future platform are therefore not add-ons to the fashion brand, but part of its commercial strategy. Stanila sees technology, accessories and additional product lines as revenue streams that can support the more expensive choice to keep fashion production local.

“What we’re trying to do with the platform, the app, the jewellery and the handbags is give ourselves more revenue streams in order to keep production local,” she admits. “If we keep only to the fashion, we only see one revenue stream.”

A different role for fashion tech

Stanila stressed the future of fashion technology is not about making sustainability sound more sophisticated,  it is about giving retailers and customers a clearer way to keep garments in use for longer.

That means moving circularity from marketing language into everyday customer behaviour. It also means helping brands build a clearer picture of what happens after checkout, a part of the journey that is still often invisible.

“Fashion first,” Stanila says of Mystic Moods. But increasingly, the brand’s biggest retail lesson may be digital: if retailers want customers to value garments for longer, the relationship cannot end when the transaction does.

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